Master and Commander The Far Side of the World
June 2008 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: Blu-ray/DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Are you one of those readers who has spent a lot of money on a good multichannel audio setup to go with your HD monitor and have difficulty finding releases that really show off your system? It’s true -- many Blu-ray Disc releases might advertise an impressive codec, but the sound designs applied to those often favor the front channels. Well, as soon as you finish reading this review, go out and buy or rent this movie. It delivers first-rate sound all the way around a 360-degree circle.

The sound engineers for this title seem to have determined that the viewer should feel like he is actually onboard a ship. All of the channels are active nearly the whole 138-minute duration of the film. The little creaks and groans that are part of a wooden ship’s expansion and contraction are all around, and the surround sounds, though they have specific locations, emanate from the soundfield, not a particular speaker. If you get seasick, this realism might make you uncomfortable, and when there’s a battle scene, it’s sure to be unsettling. Wood splinters, cannon and musket balls make thudding impact, and the general din of shouting and noise puts one squarely in the middle of the action. The cannon shots don’t just boom, they have that authentic little hiss as the rounds are sparked and discharge. Battle sounds don’t get more realistic than these. Yet when people speak you can understand nearly every word. It’s a bit tricky to find the right volume setting, as the dynamic range is so great, but it can be achieved, and once done, a listener is in for some of the best sound Blu-ray and lossless sound can offer.

The picture is good, too. All the salt spray, mixing with the sweat from hardworking men, seems tangible, and the stubble on the faces of men too long at sea has such an authentic rough look that one can practically feel what it would be like to run a hand across one’s own face in that same condition. That’s one of the most wonderful things about the picture and sound for this movie: They are so realistic that they kick your brain into high drive so you can create the rest. The cannonfire is so authentic that you can virtually smell the smoke; the ocean spray is so real you feel like you can wipe it off your face, smelling the salt as you do.

And all of the technical marvels are lavished on a movie that is taut, passionate, and filled with both drama and action. Russell Crowe plays Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, a British ship’s captain during the Napoleonic wars whose ship suffers great casualties when suddenly attacked by a French vessel. The rest of the movie chronicles Aubrey’s relentless pursuit of the enemy ship down the coast of South America and around the horn to the Galapagos Islands. The whole cast is perfect to a man, and the film is literate and exciting.

The Blu-ray Disc does include some extras, though they are not nearly worthy of the film they accompany. There are two trivia pop-up devices. The first allows the viewer to follow the exact location of the ship by pushing Enter on the remote. This brings up a map that pinpoints where the ship is geographically at any given moment in the movie. The other displays subtitle-type trivia messages that relate to action in the film. There are some hefty deleted scenes. They’re all enjoyable, but one can see why they were scuttled. To have left them in would have made the movie ponderous and unwieldy. To round things out, there’s an HD trailer and set up for D-Box Motion Control Systems.

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